It is desirable in many contexts to generate a structured textual document based on human speech. In the legal profession, for example, transcriptionists transcribe testimony given in court proceedings and in depositions to produce a written transcript of the testimony. Similarly, in the medical profession, transcripts are produced of diagnoses, prognoses, prescriptions, and other information dictated by doctors and other medical professionals.
Producing such transcripts can be time-consuming. For example, the speed with which a human transcriptionist can produce a transcript is limited by the transcriptionist's typing speed and ability to understand the speech being transcribed. Although software-based automatic speech recognizers are often used to supplement or replace the role of the human transcriptionist in producing an initial transcript, even a transcript produced by a combination of human transcriptionist and automatic speech recognizer will contain errors. Any transcript that is produced, therefore, must be considered to be a draft, to which some form of error correction is to be applied.
Producing a transcript is time-consuming for these and other reasons. For example, it may be desirable or necessary for certain kinds of transcripts (such as medical reports) to be stored and/or displayed in a particular format. Providing a transcript in an appropriate format typically requires some combination of human editing and automatic processing, which introduces an additional delay into the production of the final transcript.
Consumers of reports, such as doctors, nurses, and radiologists in the medical context, often stand to benefit from receiving reports quickly. If a diagnosis depends on the availability of a certain report, for example, then the diagnosis cannot be provided until the required report is ready. Similarly, if a doctor dictates a report of an operation into a handheld dictation device while still in the operating room, it may be desirable for a nurse to receive a transcript or other report of the dictation as soon as possible after the patient leaves the operating room. For these and other reasons it is desirable to increase the speed with which transcripts and other kinds of reports derived from speech may be produced, without sacrificing accuracy.